The Genesis Account
The ancient world was not short on creation stories. We have wandered through them already. Stories of waters raging and gods warring, of empires legitimized by bloodshed and divine bodies split open to make space for order. Again and again, these myths reveal how the pursuit of power, untethered from wisdom, inevitably bends toward control through force. But then comes Genesis. And something unexpected happens. The pattern is not denied — but it is quietly inverted. Where the myths thunder, Genesis speaks softly. Where they scream of conquest, Genesis whispers of calling. Where the gods demand to be feared, this
God simply says:
“Let there be.”
There is still water. There is still the abyss. Tohu wabohu — wild and waste. Tehom — the deep. But no spear is drawn. No monsters are slain. No blood is spilled to seed the soil. Instead, there is presence. A Spirit moves — not with violence, but with attention. It hovers. It waits.
The Wild and Waste
Genesis opens with words that modern readers often flatten: tohu wabohu — usually translated “formless and void.” At first glance, these seem fitting. Yet beneath them sits a subtle distortion — not of malice, but of modern assumptions about existence itself. In our modern scientific imagination, “formless and void” easily collapses into the idea of non-existence — a vacuum, an absence of material, of any thing. But this reading owes more to materialist cosmology than to the Hebrew worldview. The ancients were not speaking of matter vs. no matter, but of ordered function vs. uncontained chaos.
The ancient Hebrew imagination was not fixated on nothingness as modern metaphysics often is. The ancients were not burdened by our categories of matter vs. non-matter, or being vs. non-being. Their question was not whether something existed, but whether it was ordered — whether it was inhabitable, purposeful, fit for life. Tohu is not the absence of substance, but the absence of structure. It speaks of wildness — raw, ungoverned material teeming with possibility, but without coherence. Bohu follows — not as additional emptiness, but as squandered potential: presence that exists, but collapses into waste, suspended in disorder. Together, they describe not a vacuum, but a surging field of possibility veiled in disarray.
As Isaiah later reflects, “[God] did not create it to be tohu, but formed it to be inhabited” (Isaiah 45:18). The problem at the beginning is not non-existence. The problem is uncontained possibility. Some have tried to capture this nuance with phrases like “wild and waste” — words that more faithfully echo the Hebrew tone. The world that God confronts in Genesis 1 is not absent; it is unruly. It is a sea of potential energy, waiting not for domination, but for governance — not for annihilation, but for invitation into form.
The Hebrew text of tohu wabohu deserves attention. As Gerhard von Rad observed, tohu connotes “desert, waste, futility,” while bohu suggests emptiness or squandered potential (Genesis: A Commentary, 1961). Creation is thus not the production of substance from nothing, but the transformation of futility into fruitfulness. Jon Levenson points out that Genesis’ innovation is to strip chaos of its personhood: “The deep is not a rival god, but a feature of the world to be ordered” (Creation and the Persistence of Evil, 1994). Even later Jewish mystical traditions extended this reading. In Kabbalah, tohu became the “world of chaos,” a shattered potential awaiting repair (tikkun). Genesis 1 thus became not a closed story but an ongoing call to human participation in ordering.
The Abyss Beneath the Waste
If tohu wabohu names the Earth’s disorder — wildness and waste unstructured — then Genesis takes one step further down, into something older, deeper, and far more ancient: tehom — the deep.
“And darkness was upon the face of the deep (tehom).”
— Genesis 1:2
The deep is not a metaphor for nothingness. It is something worse — the bottomless uncertainty that ancient minds feared most. The abyss. The churning waters whose depths conceal what cannot be seen, measured, or controlled. In Hebrew, tehom carries unsettling echoes of its linguistic cousin Tiamat — the great sea monster of Babylonian myth. Both words draw from the same ancient Semitic root for “the surging depths.” And yet, here again, Genesis refuses the older pattern. There is no cosmic battle. No divine war to subdue the raging sea. Tehom is not slain. It is simply acknowledged. It is there. The deep is allowed to remain, but it is not left unaddressed. Instead, something remarkable occurs:
“And the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters.”
The Spirit — ruach Elohim — does not flee from the deep. It hovers. It broods. It draws near without panic. Where Babylonian gods brandished weapons to strike the sea, this God draws close with breath. Tehom remains wild, but it is not untouchable. It is not eliminated, but neither is it sovereign. The field of creation opens not by the destruction of danger, but by the containment of its excess — by boundary without annihilation. The abyss is not erased; it is patiently enfolded into a structure where its presence can serve, not threaten. The deep remains under the surface — like a subdued voltage, dangerous if uncontained, but now held in place by order that allows life to eventually rise from its depths. The tehom is calmed beneath the Spirit’s presence. The waters — hammayim — are no longer threatening, but quietly held, awaiting their purpose.
In the Hebrew imagination, water does not merely sustain survival. It nourishes sweetness. In Song of Songs, the language of mayim slips into fruitfulness and desire:
“You are a garden fountain, a well of living waters, and flowing streams from Lebanon.” (Song of Songs 4:15)
Here, mayim feeds the fruit of the beloved’s orchard — nourishing not only life, but pleasure, intimacy, and abundance. The image evokes ripened fullness — a world where life has not only begun but flourished. Water becomes not just sustenance, but delight — the ripened fruit dripping with liquid sweetness, the garden heavy with harvest. In this sense, hammayim carries not only the possibility of life, but its fullness — potential made visible. Even in its least desirable forms, water carries purpose. The Hebrew language includes euphemisms like mei raglayim — “waters of the feet” (2 Kings 18:27) — a polite reference to urine. Though waste to the body, even this form of water was not entirely discarded. Ancient practices recognized its ability to fertilize fields, cleanse materials, and return nutrients to the soil.
Thus, even here, the water cycle continues: what was discharged finds secondary purpose — echoing again that mayim is not defined by its nature alone, but by how it is ordered and utilized. Under the right relational presence, even what was perceived as waste becomes a participant in renewal.
Yet the Spirit does not see these forces as in need of conquering. It simply draws near, and by proximity, the waters yield. The hovering presence transforms wildness into readiness — a medium fit for creation. Where the Babylonian or Egyptian myths saw monsters slain, Genesis offers something stranger: A Creator who invites even the abyss to serve, not through fear, but through presence.